Running Hot and Cold

Capital cities are funny places, especially when you’re just passing through. That’s what Billy and I were doing in Canberra on the weekend. We were on our way out west to see her sister and needed a stopover to break up the drive, what with having a baby in tow and all.

We booked ourselves into a moderately classy hotel – comfort first when you’re on the road. At least, that was what we counting on. It’s not exactly high summer, so we deliberately picked somewhere with ducted heating. Canberra can get pretty cold, you know. The room we ended up with, though, fell quite a bit below the mark when the heating got stuck on full bore in the middle of the night.

Baby Hughie wasn’t very pleased with this state of affairs, and neither were we, really. We had to call up the management, who concluded we’d need to change rooms. Just what we wanted at 3am! There wasn’t really anything else for it, though. After all, heating repairs near Canberra aren’t available at the drop of a hat in the wee hours.

I can’t really blame the establishment, I suppose. They can’t be expected to have everything working perfectly 100% of the time; we just got unlucky. That said, I have noticed problems with the climate control systems – both heating and air con – at a bunch of different hotels I’ve frequented. I do wonder if they could, perhaps, stand to put just a little more thought into sticking to a maintenance schedule.

Anyway, baby Hughie finally went off to sleep just as we’d decided to call it a night and get up out of bed, so it was room service for breakfast. They do a very decent coffee there, I’ve heard, but I opted for a big old glass of iced water, in light of the fact that I’d been rocking the high temperatures all night.